Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journals

“Dear God, I don’t want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness.

My dear God, how stupid we people are until You give us something

Dear Lord, please make me want you.

Can’t anyone teach me how to pray?”

While going through an archive of Flannery O’Connor’s  personal papers, Professor W.A. Sessions found her prayer journals while she was a young writer at the Iowa Workshop.

“Few entries are longer than a page; images of the original, in a Sterling notebook, are also here. The prayers are self-flagellating, unsparing. She wants God to burn clean through her, to make her new: “I do not know you God because I am in the way,” the 21-year-old O’Connor writes. “Please help me push myself aside.””

Read the rest here.

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Ashley Perez lives, writes, and causes trouble in Los Angeles. She has a strong affinity for tattoos, otters, cat mystery books, and actual cats, but has mixed feelings about pants. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She runs the literary site Arts Collide and does work of all varieties for Women Who Submit, Entropy, Jaded Ibis Press, and Why There Are Words. You can find her on Twitter at @ArtsCollide.

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